For a crowded half-hour, Glitch's room became a concentrated hub of
activity. The task of moving the unconscious zipperhead had been
allocated to a couple of palace guards, who had used a folded blanket
to form a makeshift stretcher. Wyatt had stayed with them all the way
up the stairs, following close at their heels like a sheepdog driving
an errant flock. He had offered to carry Glitch himself, to use the
servants' staircase and save Glitch the indignity of being paraded up
the grand stairs, but the doctor had waved away his concerns and they'd
ascended the staircase accompanied by a susurrus of curiosity. Now the
guards filed out, leaving Wyatt with the doctor - Edgar Krantz, he'd
established on the way up - and Glitch, who continued to sleep, hemmed
in by a barricade of pillows and bolsters supplied by whispering,
wide-eyed maidservants. The apple core had been extracted from the bed
and disposed of, affording Wyatt a brief, bittersweet smile, and the
small nightstand and lamp nearby had been removed. The nearest hard
surface now was the chair Wyatt had pulled over to the bedside, and he
seated himself heavily, watching the doctor stoop over the bed to check
Glitch's pulse.

He held his tongue while the doctor muttered
irritably, eyes fixed on a small, silver watch. He hadn't paid much
attention to the room the night before, and now his gaze, hungry for
something to look at other than the fragile form in the bed, drifted
around the bedroom. Now that he could see it in the daylight, it didn't
seem quite so cosy as he'd first imagined. The whole suite of rooms had
an unsettling quality that he had trouble pinning down until he thought
about his own accommodation next door. It wasn't that the rooms were
the same; each had been tastefully furnished, each chair, lamp or
exquisitely upholstered couch had clearly been individually picked out
for the room it occupied. But still, they shared the same, subtle echo
of a place for visitors. They didn't look lived-in. They didn't look
like someone's home.

The only evidence of Glitch's
presence amidst the elegant furniture and mostly-empty bookshelves lay
on a table beneath the window: several open books, stacked haphazardly
as if their owner had been trying to read them all at once and, beside
them, an odd-looking instrument - a shallow, curve-sided box with a
complicated arrangement of strings and frets. A couple of the strings
were snapped and curling. Had Glitch been trying to repair it?

Krantz cleared his throat, derailing Wyatt from his contemplation.

"I'm
done here, for the time being. He may sleep through the rest of the
day, but if you notice anything... untoward, there'll be a guard
outside - he'll know how to find me." The doctor, having completed his
examination, seemed in a hurry to depart. Wyatt followed him through
into the outer room.

"Is he going to be okay?"

Krantz
made a clucking noise with his tongue. "The convulsion itself was quite
brief, and he doesn't appear to have bitten his tongue. Still, there's
no telling until I'm certain of the underlying cause. Has anything like
this happened before?"

"I can't say for sure." Wyatt stared
despondently at the empty chair with its red and gold cushions. "I
haven't been around lately. You'd be better off asking the princess."
DG wouldn't be far away, he was certain. When he'd returned to the ball
Glitchless and told her what had happened she'd been all set to go up
to the former advisor's rooms there and then, but Wyatt had intervened.
He's sleeping. Best to let him get some rest tonight and see if that helps. Would it have made a difference if a doctor had been found last night? Wyatt thrust the thought away. Maybe it would, but grabbing a big handful of blame ain't gonna help right now. Save the self-recrimination for later.
He shook his head. "Thinking about it, if he'd been sick like this
before I'm pretty sure she'd have mentioned it to me, or sent for a
doctor herself. They're pretty close." He let that sink in for a moment
before going on. "So what do we do now?"

Krantz shot another
look towards the door, his bag bumping impatiently against his leg. It
was obvious that the ex-Tin Man had no intention of letting him leave
without telling him something. "Right now? Nothing. This might
be the first and last seizure he ever has - the confusion and the sight
disturbance aren't necessarily indicative of anything particularly
sinister. Anyone can have a seizure, given the right
circumstances." A slight gleam entered his eyes, and Wyatt felt the
hairs on the back of his neck prickle at something in the doctor's
voice as he went on. "Of course, I haven't worked with a headcase
before - this might be a sign of incipient degeneration. We'll be able
to get a better idea once he's had a few more of these - if there's a
pattern, it'll show itself."

Eagerness. Like a kid in a hurry to play with a new toy. Wyatt felt his hands close into fists. "A few more? You're just going to let him suffer so that you can study him? What if he has one of these that he doesn't recover from?"

"We'll
carry out other tests in the meantime, of course. If we can find any
obvious physical causes, we may be able to help. The brain is a complex
organ, Mr Cain. That he was functioning so well with only half of one
for so long is astonishing in itself. His eyesight, his motor skills...
in most cases the side controlled by the absent hemisphere should be
significantly impaired. You should take comfort in the fact that he's
had such a good run..." Krantz hesitated as Wyatt's eyes narrowed.

"You
better hope I'm not hearing you right. You're basically telling me that
he's dying, and I just have to accept it? That I have to be thankful he
lasted this long? This is my friend you're talking about. Not some kind
of - of experiment."

Krantz gave him a look of
manufactured sympathy that Wyatt itched to hit. "You're upset. It's
understandable. But I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. I have
not said that he's dying. It may be that medication will help him. It
may be that it does not. I'm simply giving you the facts, unpleasant
though they may be - he has, from what you say, experienced remarkable
good health until this point. I can't predict how long that good
fortune can hold out, or if it has deserted him now. All I can do is
observe and attempt to learn more. Dispassionately."

Wyatt
forced himself to relax. It was either that or throw Krantz through the
window, and the sound of breaking glass might wake Glitch. "I'm not
good at standing around doing nothing." Not by choice, anyhow. "There must be something I can do while I'm here?"

"You
can stay with him. Assuming he has any recollection of the time leading
up to the episode, it would be useful to assemble any information that
you can on prior symptoms. If he doesn't recover from the
disorientation, he also needs someone to make sure he doesn't wander
off - if there had been no one with him this time, he might have been
more seriously injured."

What about just being there so
there's a friendly face around when he wakes up? Did you oversleep the
day they covered bedside manner, you cold-hearted son of a bitch?
He nodded anyway - he'd had no intention of leaving Glitch alone, no
matter what the doctor had said. "I can do that. Will you be talking to
the Queen about this?"

The doctor gave a curt nod, but Wyatt
suspected he was in no hurry to request that particular audience. "She
will receive my report, of course."

She will receive my report.
So clinical and detached. Wyatt wanted to take him by the shoulders and
shake him until the bland smile fell off his face, and tell him about
the man he was treating like a laboratory specimen. About the way that
Glitch had followed him into the trees after they'd found Adora's
grave, stealing gradually into the circle of his grief,
uncharacteristically quiet and still. How he'd seen the tears and said
nothing, but placed himself firmly in Wyatt's way, blocking his line of
sight to an empty metal suit, then, later, had helped him to topple the
hateful thing and brought him a stone from the fireplace of the ruined
shack to smash the faceplate. This is Glitch, doc. He likes
dancing, and apples, and interesting butterflies, and science so
advanced it'd make your head spin. He could kick you so hard both your
ears would end up on the same side, and he's spent longer than it took
you to earn that shiny stethoscope starving and sleeping in ditches,
but he doesn't like fighting and he wouldn't go Longcoat hunting with
me and Jeb without one of those big embroidered palace pillows. He's a
complicated, amazing human being, and if it came down to the world
doing without either him or you, I'd shoot you in a heartbeat.

Taking
advantage of his distraction, Krantz had made his way to the door,
casting one last proprietorial glance back at the bedroom. "If there's
nothing else, Mr Cain, I have work to be getting on with. I'll return
this evening, unless anything happens in the meantime, in which case
I'm sure you'll let me know." Then he was gone, the door closing
quietly behind him.

Wyatt stared at the door for a while,
wishing he could lock it. A chair jammed under the handle would do at a
pinch. Anything to ensure that Krantz couldn't get back in. Don't be so damn paranoid. He's a doctor. That didn't help. Raynz had been some sort of doctor, hadn't he? And now you're being ridiculous. So you don't like the guy - that doesn't make him a sadistic nut like Raynz.
He turned his back deliberately on the door, trying to rein in his
antipathy, and went back through the arch to settle in the chair beside
Glitch's bed.

He sat and watched the sleeping man for some time,
taking advantage of the solitude to study him properly. It had been too
dark last night and too fraught this morning to take in anything beyond
how tired and confused Glitch had looked. Now, Wyatt leaned forward,
his eyes tracing the familiar features, surprised at how clearly they
had etched themselves into his memory. A long, narrow face, the nose
rather aquiline. An expressive curve of a mouth, quick to smile and
bracketed by dimples, now set in a faint frown. Dark lashes closed over
eyes that were crinkled at the corners, little creases born of enduring
optimism and years of bright sunslight. I remember you, even if you don't remember me.
Every last detail, from the moment the zipperhead's anxious face had
peered in through the algae-rimmed window of his metal prison, to the
fleeting look of dawning recognition he had worn just before the
seizure had erased everything. Wyatt found that he was carrying the
memory of that expression close to his heart alongside the tin horse,
which he'd discovered when he'd risen from the grass, his knee
complaining where the battered metal figure had bruised it. If Glitch
didn't recover...

Not wanting to follow that thought through to
its conclusion, he got up and crossed to the window, where he set about
tidying the books into an orderly pile. Might as well see that you have a neat place to wake up to...
At the base of the stack he placed a thick and serious-looking volume
bearing the weighty title of 'Plasma Theory and High Energy Density
Physics', made thicker still by a sheaf of makeshift bookmarks. On top
of that, absurd beside the scientific text, a child's colouring book.
Wyatt flicked through the coarse paper before setting the book down,
biting his lip at the sight of the large, simple mandalas within, which
had been inexpertly filled with bright hues that spilled excitedly
across the black borders. He thought about a feather, shining
brilliance and dusty earthbound brown all at the same time, and
wondered why, with his apparent fascination with vivid colours, Glitch
hadn't used blue anywhere. Maybe he just didn't have a blue crayon.

A
hot-air balloon drifted across the cover of another book, a top-hatted
man peering from the basket. The suns had washed most of the colour
from the illustration, and the well-thumbed pages were all but falling
out of their bindings; he put it down with care, as if the wellbeing of
the fragile book was somehow inextricably linked to the wellbeing of
its fragile owner. There was a more sturdy volume beside it, and Wyatt
picked it up to admire the flower-like swirls tooled into the leather
cover. After a certain amount of internal debate, he opened it,
expecting to see diagrams and mind-twisting formulae and was greeted
instead by a photograph - a dark-haired man with glasses and a petite
woman whose headscarf was struggling valiantly to hold back a tide of
long, curly hair and, between them, a small boy beaming exuberantly
from beneath the shade of his father's too-large hat. Beneath the
photograph, in the careful, well-spaced hand of someone concentrating
intently on one letter at a time was a caption:

Dad's neW caMera

It
was undoubtedly Glitch; the hat came down over his eyes, but there was
no mistaking that grin. On his right, or the left as Wyatt looked at
it, the woman - who was mere inches taller than her son - had thrown an
affectionate arm around his shoulder. His father hadn't been quite as
demonstrative, but he looked contented enough, in a serious sort of
way. Wyatt traced a finger over the corner of the photograph. There had
been a brief, wistful pang at the image - a happy family - but his
sorrow came more gently these days and he caught himself smiling at the
boy in the oversized hat.

He turned the page, ignoring a quiet
internal voice that said this was none of his business. This time it
took him a moment to make sense of the photograph, but once he'd
stopped looking for a face amidst the lines and planes of black and
white, the image resolved itself into the brightly-lit doorway of a
wooden building. Beyond the worn boards, cool shadows held the
suggestion of machinery - wheels and rivets, metal struts arching
proudly like the neck of a thoroughbred horse. Beneath, in the small,
laboriously neat handwriting, was the cryptic 'Uncle Oscar built it!'
and Wyatt wondered if the same hand that had propelled the pen with
slow determination around the letters could be responsible for the
pencilled mechanisms that filled the margins, delicate and complex as
cobwebs, confidently exploring every inch of unoccupied paper.

That's enough. This isn't some investigation you're on...
He nodded, agreeing with the voice, then turned to the next page
anyway. There was a sudden flash of white and a discordant, metallic
jangle - startled, he put the album back on the table and looked around
guiltily, but Glitch slept on, oblivious. A thick wedge of paper had
slipped from between the pages, landing on the unfamiliar instrument.
Wyatt waited for the voice to say 'I told you so', but there was only
the diminishing thrum of the vibrating strings. He pressed them into
silence, recalling the way Glitch's arm had trembled beneath his hand,
and then -

"I'm not thinking about that right now," he
whispered, and picked up the paper - a single sheet, folded with
careful, precise creases and covered with slanting, untidy scrawl he
couldn't decipher. Released from the album, it had opened a little way,
revealing itself to be a strangely-constructed aeroplane. Wyatt smiled,
imagining a bored young Ambrose folding the paper while he waited for
his classmates to catch up with him. Guess you had a lot of free time, Genius.

Might be a while since I sat in a schoolroom, but I don't remember this kind of paperwork lying around.
He turned the paper plane over in his hands, then held it up, as if to
throw it. The wings seemed too small to support the fuselage, and the
weight was distributed towards the nose, but why would Glitch have
saved it if it was no good? Strange little thing. I wonder how you fly? The sunslight through the thick paper revealed a watermark.

ENTRAL CITY MEDICAL EXA

Enough. This time the voice was adamant, and Wyatt folded the plane carefully along its axis and replaced it in the album, shaken. No more. They're Glitch's memories, and nobody has the right to rifle through them without his say-so. He returned to the chair, carefully moving it closer to the bed.

"For what it's worth, Glitch, I'm sorry."

The
suns moved on, oblivious to the Tin Man, careless of the paper memories
or the intangible web of emotions they could spin out of nothing,
content to follow the physics-simple path before them, fading ink and
warming the wood of the table. The shadows turned a little, marking out
the passing time.